If you have been to the Riverside Farmer's Market in Reno - there's a good chance you have seen our Someone 2 Know. As the founder and head cultivator of “Biggest Little Mushrooms”, Walker Sauls is there every week selling his latest crop.
His mission is to cultivate health and sustainability through the art of working with fungi.
We caught up with Walker at the farmer’s market, plus - he let us tour his cultivation site. Educating the curious about mushrooms is just one part of the job for Sauls. "That's probably one of my favorite parts of the job, connecting with people,” he smiles.
There are a lot of relevant fungi facts to share. "For example, the oyster mushrooms, that I work with - they are very high in statins which is in the class of drugs that doctors will prescribe to people with high cholesterol.”
And for a great many people - mushrooms are also delicious for dinner.
"These are gonna have like a rich, earthy umami flavor,” he explains to a visitor at the farmer’s market. Most of us are used to mushrooms grown in the wild - plucked from the dirt. Walker cultivates his mushrooms, right in Reno.
"This is one of the rooms and it does have some beautiful clusters in here,” Sauls shares, giving us a special look at one of the cultivation spaces.
Walker's journey with mushrooms started after he graduated UNR with a degree in environmental science. "I was living on the Oregon coast, surrounded by mushrooms and I became fascinated by them. It was just a natural interest. I started foraging for them and kinda studying them, doing outdoor grows.”
A couple of years ago, Walker moved back to Reno "and I realized I could merge my interest of mushrooms and sustainability and start a business."
So, Biggest Little Mushrooms was born. Walker developed a growing system - and a very specific environment for his fungi. "The right conditions for the correct rate of growth" - things like temperature and humidity.
Plus, another vital factor -
"When you're growing them in a controlled way, it's cleanliness. So, a lot of cleaning, making sure everything is sterile."
Mushrooms grow quickly and scientific research has proven how good they are for the environment - even when cultivated indoors. "They are decomposers, they eat things that otherwise would go to waste. So, I grow all of my mushrooms on things like hard wood shavings, the hulls of soy beans. I've grown a lot of mushrooms on coffee grounds.”
Walker says he's learned a lot and done a lot of fine-tuning over the past two years - and now, the hard work is paying off. "I'm now supplying five restaurants, the Great Basin Food Co-Op and Riverside Farmer's Market."
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Right now, Walker is growing and selling - pink, blue, white and black-pearl King-Oyster mushrooms and Shiitakes, plus - the unique and popular Lion's Mane mushroom.
For links to the social media for BIGGEST LITTLE MUSHROOMS, click here https://www.instagram.com/biggestlittlemushrooms/?hl=en
